Hangman

Hangman is the schoolroom paper-and-pencil game everyone has played. Same shape here: a hidden word from a curated themed list, six wrong guesses, and the gallows-and-figure drawn one stroke at a time.

The game is older than its name. The first published version appears in Alice Bertha Gomme's 1894 Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland under the title "Birds, Beasts and Fishes" — one player writes the first and last letters of an animal name, the other guesses the letters in between. No gallows, no figure, no penalty drawing. The gallows imagery and the name "Hangman" show up later, in a 1902 Philadelphia Inquirer article describing it as a parlor game at masked "White Cap" parties. The pencil-and-paper Victorian origin is well-attested in Tony Augarde's Oxford Guide to Word Games.

Strategy is mostly about letter frequency. In English text the letter E shows up far more than any other (about 13 % of all letters), followed by T, A, O, I, N — which is why E is the textbook opening guess. The hardest standard-dictionary word to guess, by computational analysis, is jazz: three uncommon-letter slots framing a common vowel, leaving only a handful of plausible misses before the figure is complete. (That analysis is Jon McLoone's 2010 simulation at Wolfram — about five million games run across the entire English dictionary to find the word that beat the most simulated players.) Themed wordlists shift the math: a word picked from US states or musical instruments has very different letter probabilities than one drawn from English at large.

The word library is shared with the other word puzzles on this site — a single JSON file of themes, each carrying a curated list of common-English words. The library is fetched once when the page loads and cached by your browser; no network traffic happens during play. Everything else — word selection, guess validation, stats — runs in your browser. There are no accounts and no leaderboards.